foolfillment: the blog

Castellers by pepesaura [old skool pride]

Robert Jones did me the dubious honour of tagging me for this passion quilt meme. Actually it was a pleasure, most memes are a bit rubbish – just cheap content creation for blogs. This one was a refreshing change. Think of something you are passionate about teaching to your pupils, then find an image to illustrate that.

I love challenging young people to work together and create something remarkable, I first found out about castelling after seeing a a photo taken by my friend Diarmid when he lived in Barcelona, but I thought this photo illustrated this passion better because it is mid-construction and actually involves younsters. I suppose there is a point to be made about usefulness of what is created but, the sense of community that seems to abound castelling has got to count for something doesn’t it?

Now I have to tag 5 new people: Krysia Smyth, Robert Clements, Ollie Bray, Eddie Mack (no blog, yet), and Duncan Smeed.

Here are the rules:
1. Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
2. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
4. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

Tomorrow night I’m giving the first of three sessions on Advanced PowerPoint. I’m not entirely sure what I should be covering, as almost all the people coming will have different abilities and requirements. To get around this tomorrow I’m going to miss out most of the actual features and options that the software has and instead talk about why you shouldn’t use PowerPoint!

Because I’m nice I’m making the slides available now for those people who are coming late or not at all. The most useful bits from the file are probably the accompanying notes but you can get away with just looking at the slides. Advanced PowerPoint Session 1. I should make it clear that some of the ideas covered are influenced by a series of posts from the Modern Foreign Languages Environment blog, the first of which can be viewed here.

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The first thing we did at the Learning and Teaching session on Thursday was to spend a little time on our own, quietly thinking about what our most intense learning experience was. No more detail than that, it was up to us to decide what that meant. I thought I might share what mine was and some of my thoughts about the task.

I had a couple of ideas, obviously to pick out one period in particular is hard, but I first thought about what the task really was. Is the emphasis on ‘intense’? (and what does that mean?) Or is it on the learning bit? A single experience? Initially I thought back to my first year at uni. I was studying Electrical Engineering and throughout the year had a number of assignments to do for maths. These were usually fairly short notice and a lot more work than anything else we got. The questions often seemed really distinct from what we had covered in lectures and tutorials so it was usually a fairly frantic time working out what the questions meant in relation to all the bits we knew and somehow piece them together to get the answers. It felt intense, but thinking back did I learn anything from them? It was tough and I was using things I had been studying, but can I remember any of it now? Certainly not.

What I might have learned from it is the value of working with others to solve problems, or some skills in breaking problems in to smaller pieces. In truth all that I learnt was that if you don’t know what the question means then just try something, anything, and if it still makes no sense then just try a few other things and hand in all of the different bits of work and you’ll get a handful of marks rather than none. Tactics, nothing more, nothing less.

The experiences I came up with that represent some real learning are both caving related. One was the first time I did SRT – this is doing things with ropes at the tops of things like cliffs. You have a harness and a whole range of bits of complex metalwork and lots of ropes. If you don’t use them properly then there is every chance that you will hurt yourself, and when you hurt yourself in a cave then it is usually very serious. So, the first time I went into a cave that required SRT I had to learn how to do it, and I had to learn fast.

The other one was a little later when I learned how to rig caves for SRT, not just going in and using a rope that someone else has put there but being the person who puts the rope into place. Again, make a mistake here and someone could get hurt, or worse. The difference was the person who gets hurt wasn’t just me any more but other people too, now that is responsibility.

In both of these situations I was safe because I was with someone who was teaching me how to do things properly and would stop me before I made a mistake, but I still had to make sure I knew not just what to do but also why I do those things. Without an understanding of all the equipment and knots then I would not have learned how to do things safely, I wouldn’t have learnt anything except how to cope if I found myself in the same cave in exactly the same situation. Instead I worked out what knots to use when, why you route the rope that way in this cave and when you would do similar/different things in other caves. How to go through a procedure of checking in a way that means I am safe and so are those with me. A huge number of things that all fit together into a much bigger picture.

What links these experiences, and what made them intense experiences is that I had a big responsibility, if I didn’t learn then things could have gone horribly wrong if I were to get to a cave in the future without support and realise I didn’t know what to do, or worse thought I knew but got it wrong.

These are very personal experiences, and they were situations where I learned because of a stick more than a carrot. I had to learn so I did, it was that or make both a physical and psychological retreat. The question is how does this relate to my teaching? Of course I can’t put my pupils into a situation where they have to learn else lives are in danger. I think the idea of advance or retreat is important. I learned because I had to but also wanted to. The aim is to find a way to make pupils want to learn rather than to make them learn.

I was at a Learning and Teaching session for NQTs this afternoon led by Don Ledingham. What a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon it was. I left feeling challenged, positive, and invigorated. Most of all though I felt completely sure that I am in the right job in the right place at the right time.

I wanted to write something up tonight before I being to forget bits, as I write it up though it is turning into a bit of a long post, so I’m going to give a brief overview of some of the challenging questions we were asked then focus on one part. Don has already written a short post on his thoughts on the session.
What was your most intense learning experience? What made it so?
What was your best lesson? What did you do in it? What are some keywords that sum it up? And what about yesterday, how did those lessons compare? Could they have been similar?

In typical Scottish fashion we found it hard to find examples of a good lesson at first, but they did come eventually. It was great to hear the different stories that people had. Some common themes cropped up: shared intentions; collaboration; interaction; discussion; tangible success for the students – which they define.

I don’t think I heard anyone say their best lesson included times where they went off at tangents. For me one of my best lessons was last year. I had a ten minute slot to fill, like a warm up act for the class teacher. I had been asked to introduce timber to some 1st years – cue the groans. “Why on Earth would we want to know about different types of tree!?” Well, I began by asking about the types of tree they knew. Christmas tree inevitably came up. Good, everyone knows the shape of them so it’s easy to talk about identifying softwoods. But what about hardwoods? Do they have many branches? Can you climb them? No, you can’t easily climb them – not that any of them realised that at first, nor why. I showed them this picture which I took in Romania on a caving expedition.

We were doing some SRT* practice above ground – the only thing we could attach a rope to was a huge tree, but it’s branches are way off the ground. I didn’t explain how we got the rope up there… But after that they did know lots of ways of telling apart hard and soft wood trees, they found a way of linking the trees to the types of timber you get from them. They thought about how that affected the possible things you can use different timber types for. They thought about where different trees grow. Why, for instance did none of them know about climbing hardwoods? Because they don’t see them, yet they are surrounded by hardwood timbers in their homes and in the school, in particular the workshops they work in which were kitted out in beech benches and cupboards. (The likes of which PPP schools can only dream of.)

“What about uses for wood?” I asked.
‘Paper’
‘well done’
‘tables’
‘very good’

Then I asked
‘What about for drinking from? What about making every single thing you own from wood?’ This didn’t really make them happy – “how could you possibly make everything from wood? That’s crazy talk” I showed them some photos I took in the Peruvian Amazon Jungle…

I also showed them a photo taken on the floating islands on Lake Titicaca (teehee) where the islands and almost everything on them are made of reeds that grow on the lake bed.

My 10 minute slot over-ran a bit, because they were so engaged with something that minutes earlier they had no interest in whatsoever. They were full of questions and stories, what did they learn? They thought they learned that you can get Mr Meldrum to go waaay off topic just by asking him about travelling, but they also learned that different types of timber have lots of different uses, they learned about sustainable development, they learned about appreciating different cultures, they also learned a bit about respecting the environment around you and the wildlife within it. If they’d pushed in the right directions I could easily have gone on to talk more about SRT which would have given them a huge opportunity to learn all about cams, pulleys, friction, and a host of other mechanical systems/properties that otherwise wouldn’t have been covered in their 1st year of school.

So, that was one of my best lessons, and I think the best bit of it was that I had the scope to go off on a tangent and follow up on the things that the pupils engaged with. I was able to give them not just knowledge in discrete packets, but to give them a meaning and context to those packets of knowledge. I don’t think I heard much talk of tangents today, are probationers all scared of being unprepared? Do we all over-plan? I know I am and do.

I’ll write up more on this, I found it a hugely enjoyable and worthwhile session. I just wish there’d been more time for discussion/debate at the end.

*Single Rope Technique – a way of gaining or losing height in caves and other hard-to-access areas using a system involving one fixed rope and a guddle of bits of metal and other short ropes.

On the invitation of Guinea Pig Mum I went along to see about helping our at Tranent ASC on Thursday and Friday night. I had been meaning to get in touch with my old coach for a while to see about getting involved in swimming at some level but I was waiting for school to settle down then see just how much time I would have to commit.

Going back to the Loch Centre for the first time in about 6 years really made me think back, on two levels. First, the building has barely changed in all the time I’ve been away so I found myself slipping back into what is basically an old habit or routine – taking the stairs in the same way by swinging round the banister at the bend, using the same changing cubicle, standing/sitting in the same old places – it was as though nothing had changed. I even found the swimmers using a kickboard that was covered in doodles and names of people I used to train with.

On another level it made me think about how you teach people. I can only remember how I swam aged 16 not aged 8, likewise I can’t remember what my coaches did to progress my swimming when I was 8, those memories have all been replaced by those of what happened later.

I know I have all this knowledge about how to swim well, but I don’t know how to get it out. I could take a session of swimmers who are at a similar level to me when I stopped, but younger than that I don’t know where to begin.
Yet, this is what I do at school. I switch from teaching 1st years to sketch to teaching 4th years how to draw complicated measured perspective drawings. I go from showing a senior to cut a mortice and tenon joint to showing a 1st year how to hold a saw.

I suppose it is all about breaking everything down into its component parts in my head, going back to first principles then building it up from there. How do I do that in swimming though? It feels like I need to try to forget everything I know and teach myself from scratch.

The week before last I had the fantastic privilege of visiting Islay High School, on the invitation of Ian Stuart. I’ve been pretty busy since and haven’t had the chance to blog about it until now.

The whole time I was impressed with what I saw. The island itself was beautiful but it was what is happening in the school that is really exciting. Anyone who already reads Ian’s blog will know a little about what they are doing and there’s no point me reiterating it here but I’ll try to summarise briefly.
All the teachers have a tablet PC and a wireless projector in every classroom, in the coming session each pupils will be given an Ultra Mobile PC that they will do a majority of their work on. Each day the UMPCs sync all work with the school’s network so no work is lost.
There are clearly loads of opportunities for using all of this technology, but the other changes being made are perhaps more interesting. Rather than a drive towards specialising on one subject area there is more of a push for widening out opportunities for the pupils. One big change to the usual way of working is the removal of age and stage restrictions, by doing this pupils can take new subjects later in school that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to, it also means that there are classes all operating at one lever but with different ages of pupils. By doing this there is now more space in the timetable so every Wednesday and Friday afternoon is open for different project activities that the pupils can choose.

I really enjoyed seeing all that was going on and wish I’d had more time there. I think there’s a lot we can all learn so if you haven’t already done so, go and subscribe to Ian’s blog or better still try to arrange a visit to see for yourself. Next session will be really interesting to read about as all the pupils should have their UMPCs, the second batch of which arrived while I was there.

Thanks for letting me come over Ian!

IDEA has just announced its ‘call for submission’ for Thaw 2007. IDEA is the Industrial Designers of Edmonton Association (so not local) and Thaw is an event which gives “visitors an opportunity to view and purchase innovative and original products and ideas.”

The brief is interesting, in short it is ‘imagine there was no oil.’ I don’t see anything stopping schools in Scotland taking up this challenge, there is no benefit of actually submitting to this event – the only prize as such would be recognition so the costs would far outweigh the benefits – but a local (within school or authority?) equivalent competition could be feasible and would tie in very nicely with areas of the curriculum, citizenship for example. Of course most of the crafting that happens in schools is with wood or metal anyway so ruling out plastic isn’t too much of a hurdle, but try coming up with a new CD case, or redesigning most of the stuff in your kitchen.

via Land+Living

[tags]idea, design, sustainable development, schools, thaw2007[/tags]

“Few are moved by the pot of gold at the end of the impossible rainbow; few, likewise, by the easy capture of the paltry.”
Biggs, J. B. AND Moore, P., 1993. The Process of Learning Sydney: Prentice Hall

Motivation is proving to be an important part of my research in my final year project. What is it that makes people want to learn? The combination of the chance of success and the perceived value of what can be learned, suggested Biggs.

[tags]teaching, motivation, quote, biggs[/tags]

So, I was in uni today, talking with my supervisor about my project (it’s going okay, thanks) and we got talking with the course leader, who shares the same office, about the future of subjects in CDT. More and more schools are going down the route of teaching only Craft and Design, and Graphic Communication. The point that came up was that these subjects are the ones that are (apologies if this hurts any of you) easy to teach and easy to learn. This is because essentially these courses only offer up skills, there is not really any academic aspect to them, they require pupils to learn how do perform some tasks but do not require much understanding or learning to occur.

This post is a bit of a ramble and there are no fully thought out ideas here, so feel free to chip in with your ideas of CDT, or to tell me that you disagree. It’s likely I will edit this if I get more of an idea of what I think should happen.
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Building the Curriculum is a report out recently which takes a step further along the road of the development of ACE, it includes sections about different curriculum areas, including Technologies.

This curriculum area includes creative, practical and work-related experiences and outcomes in craft, design, engineering, graphics, food, textile, and information technologies.

So my subjects then. Exciting is the mention of engineering, Technological Studies is an excellent subject taught from Standard Grade up to Advanced Higher – but only in a handful of schools. When it was introduced it fell flat on its face in the west of Scotland and only really took off in pockets along the east coast. Such was the dislike of it in the west coast that Technical departments headed up by teachers who only want to cut and glue wood actively squashed pupils’ interest anything remotely related to the subject and gave away or threw out the (expensive) equipment so that they could never be made to teach it again. Which makes me sad, kids like cutting wood and making interesting models and this is something that should continue being taught, but at the same time they are really intersted in how things work – and these would be covered in Technological Studies. Things like a basic understanding of forces, electronics, mechanisms, and programming.

These are all taught as descrete components but they all link together extremely well and there is huge scope for cross-curricular links (physics, computing, maths), as well as fun extra-curricular clubs.

But how to make it a popular course?
The first thing people need to realise is that it isn’t an easy course, too many schools use technical subjects as a dumping ground and while Craft and Design might be a suitable subject for the unenthused pupils, Tech Studies definitely isn’t.

Secondly the schools that do Tech Studies well make the kids realise that technology is exciting (building a buggy that follows a white line is cool, and easy for a third year to understand and do) but other schools teach it as a dry maths based chore. Instead of drawing endles numbers of triangles, why not actually build a bridge, or a tower? Why not build them out of materials that shouldn’t work as a way of illustrating the ideas? One of the best projects I ever did was build a tower out of spaghetti and marshmallows.
Thirdly, don’t make teachers who don’t care about it teach it. There are loads of teachers who want to make craft models all day, or just do drawing. That’s fine but don’t then make them teach programming when they haven’t got the faintest idea about it and haven’t had training for it.

Teachers are the key to successful implementation of A Curriculum for Excellence. The quality of learning and teaching in every classroom – and the inspiration, challenge and enjoyment which can come from teachers’ enthusiasm and commitment – will be critical to achieving our aspirations for all young people.

I hope I end up with the opportunity to teach Technological Studies. If I don’t I’m certainly going to get an after school club running where they build something fun and learn what a triangle is useful for.